Follow POL on Twitter Last year, a divided Second Circuit decided Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, which ended three decades of abusive application of the Alien Tort Statute—an eighteenth-century federal law—against innocent-bystander corporate defendants through application of amorphous concepts of international law. The losing plaintiffs have submitted a certiorari petition noting the circuit split with the Eleventh Circuit. [SCOTUSblog via Bashman; Jackson]
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Recently in International Human Rights Category
President Obama declared his support for the non-binding UN resolution, which declares "indigenous peoples have a right to lands and resources they traditionally occupied or otherwise used." As I tell WND (in a story with an unrealistically scary headline), one can expect tribes to use such a resolution in an attempt to relitigate long-resolved land disputes. Walter Olson's excellent forthcoming book, Schools for Misrule has a chapter on such litigation. The American Lawyer has posted six excerpts from the outtakes of lawyer Steven Donziger in the "documentary" Crude that Chevron claims demonstrates an attempt to corrupt the Ecuadorian justice process. Kenneth Anderson has details about today's Second Circuit decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. See also Julian Ku. Update: More from Kenneth Anderson. Yesterday morning, at a conference co-sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, the Institute for Legal Reform at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a new paper entitled "Think Globally, Sue Locally: Out-of-Court Tactics Employed by Plaintiffs, Their Lawyers, and Their Advocates in Transnational Tort Cases" (PDF). In cases involving the 1789 Alien Tort Statute as well as other litigation -- including U.S. litigation to enforce dubious, fraudulently obtained foreign verdicts -- plaintiffs' lawyers are increasingly trying to use American courts to recover for alleged conduct that happened overseas. As the report documents, such litigation is typically accompanied by out-of-court media, community organizing, investor-relations, and political tactics. The study author, Jonathan Drimmer, wrote this piece in The Wall Street Journal discussing his findings. More whetting of transnational-law appetites, via Mother Jones: "According to a forthcoming United Nations study, the world's 3,000 biggest public companies could be on the hook for $2.2 trillion--more than 30 percent of their profits--if they were made to pay for the fallout of their carbon emissions." According to Cymie R. Payne at the American Society of International Law's ASIL Insight, that's one of the holdings in a new International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling in a dispute between Argentina and Uruguay over a giant pulp mill on the Uruguay River. Julian Ku has more at Opinio Juris here and here. According to Dapo Akande at the European Journal of International Law's EJIL Talk, arresting the Pope in Britain, as some "human rights" lawyers and others have proposed, would itself be a violation of international law. "The Vatican has a tiny territory and a tiny population but it does fulfill the criteria for Statehood." [via Ku] More: Infamy or Praise.
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